Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

6 AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
The Bureau's electric van, with "Bureau of Standards, Department of Commerce and
Labor," somewhat blurred, inscribed on its panel, at the express office on Pennsyl-
vania Avenue, picking up a shipment of instruments or equipment. The van has been
identified as a Pope-Waverly, probably the 1903 or 1904 model.
The great wonders of the age, everyone agreed, were electricity and
the electric light, the automobile, the telephone, the railroad, and telegraph
lines threading the Nation, and the growing number of farm machines
operated by steam engines.6 Tributes to new engineering skills included
such stone structures as the Cabin John Bridge above Washington, the great
steel Brooklyn Bridge, and the combination of these materials in the new sky-
scrapers in Chicago and in the 21-story Flatiron Building, New York's first
skyscraper, then under construction.
Of the telephone Thomas C. Mendenhall, president of Rose Polytechnic Institute, said:
"But the wonder of it all is [that it works] - Nothing like it in simplicity of construction,
combined with complexity of operation, is to be found in any other human contrivance."
A Century of Electricity (Boston and New York: Houghton & Muffin, 1887), p.
208.